


The Metaphorical Entity. Or What Quill Birthed.

by FernDavant



Category: Class (TV 2016)
Genre: Crack, Gen, Unplanned Pregnancy, post-episode: The Metaphysical Engine or What Quill Did, the least kidfic of all possible kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 18:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8679298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernDavant/pseuds/FernDavant
Summary: It takes a village to raise a kid. Although, was it even technically a kid? or The gang crowdsources parenting.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is levendis/Whifferdills' fault. We were having a conversation complaining about the pregnancy storyline, and then that somehow turned into, "Okay, but what if she just gave birth to a meme," which somehow turned into this.

It looked like someone had pixelated a portion of the world, as though there was just a random bit of nudity or a floating brand on a BBC show that needed blurring out. But that pixilation just hovered there, in the air, pulsing slightly, and occasionally flickering into colors that may or may not exist within the spectrum humans could sense.

“What is it?” Ram had asked, squinting at it. He poked it with the rubber end of a pencil. It caused the air around it to vibrate menacingly.

“It’s a Sim’s dick when it’s taking a shower,” Tanya offered.

“It’s the miracle of life,” April said, almost immediately wanting to punch herself in the face for having said those words.

“No, but seriously, what is it?” Charlie asked, turning to Quill who was very quietly trying to bury herself in a mattress.

“Not my problem. I’m supposed to be dead,” Quill groaned.

**

It took two days to convince Quill she wasn’t going to die, although Tanya suspected she was malingering because Matteusz kept giving her ice cream, and she didn’t want to look anyone in the eye after having given birth to Q*bert.

“This is what happens when you shag robots,” Ram said darkly.

“Ram, you barely know what happens when you shag women,” April huffed.

Ram’s face had turned an interesting color, and they hadn’t seen him for the rest of the day.

In the meantime, Gimp-->Filters-->Blur-->Pixelize shimmied randomly around the room Quill was hiding in. Tanya and Matteusz had both spent a fair amount of time watching it, trying to discern a pattern to its movement, but none revealed itself immediately.

Except for the fact that whenever Quill was watching Netflix on the iPad under the covers, lowrestexture inevitably seemed to follow.

**

It was a Roomba, with a cat in a shark costume on it. The whole thing. Not three separate entities. Just. A gestalt entity.

The tinny sound of a Roomba running and someone laughing uproariously emitted from the cat whenever it opened its mouth.

This was what Matteusz saw when he came downstairs into the kitchen to find Quill eating a bagel and checking Instagram.

“What is that?” Matteusz had asked.

“It’s a Roomba, with a cat in a shark costume on it,” Quill had offered, not looking up.

Matteusz had paused and reflected upon how he could have potentially phrased that question better. “Is it alien?”

“I expect so,” Quill replied. “I gave birth to it.”

“That’s Dyskoteka?” Matteusz asked in shock, forgetting, momentarily, that it was probably not a good idea to reveal to someone that you had named their child the Polish word for ‘disco.’

“Who, what, now?” Quill said, finally looking up.

“That’s—that’s your…child?”

Quill sniffed at the Roomba/cat combination. “Yeah.”

“How long has it been like that?”

“Oh, I dunno. Just started doing stuff like this a couple of days ago. Aren’t you going to be late for school?”

“It’s Saturday,” Matteusz protested. “And what do you mean ‘stuff like this?’”

**

“That’s Quilliam?” April gasped, looking at the shiba inu doing a passable imitation of that ‘Maniac’ dance in _Flashdance_.

“Who?” Quill huffed, bewildered and angry that the whole gang had crowded into the living room of the flat that she _still,_ for some ungodly reason, shared with Charlie (and Matteusz).

“Your kid!” April explained crossly.

“Do you all have names for it?” Quill questioned, seeming genuinely curious.

“Quilliam,” April repeated with a shrug.

“Dyskoteka,” Matteusz added.

“Porygon. Or missingno. I haven’t decided yet, and I’m still playing Sun and Moon, so it might be getting an Alolan form,” Tanya offered.

“Blinky,” Charlie admitted.

“Simon!” Ram said with a smirk. “Didn’t any of you lot give him a normal name?”

“You only named him Simon because you said it looked like that electronic game,” April pointed out accusingly.

Ram sulked prettily.

“Why? What do you call it?” Matteusz asked finally.

“’Oops,’ mostly,” Quill confessed. “Occasionally, ‘yikes!’ or ‘nope,’ depending on my mood and what exactly it’s doing.”

The shiba inu began barking “Jingle Bells” in time to its dance moves.

Everyone in the room tried to ponder the special significance of this development.

**

It was a cat now.

This was, apparently, something that Porygon did. It followed Quill around, watched what Quill watched, or read what Quill read, and then decided it was bored with the form it was in presently, and would really prefer to try on this other form.

Quill chose to consume the most interesting forms of entertainment.

“She’s given birth to a meme,” April said the week that it had spent as a lizard that sang “Gagnam Style.”

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” Ram admitted. “Not, quite so literally, maybe.”

However, it was a cat now, and Tanya was ostensibly doing maths homework with Matteusz and Charlie, but, in actuality, watching Porygon patter about the place, being adorable.

“Is it sentient?” Tanya asked Quill as Porygon shoved itself into a box that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but which Tanya suspected, was actually, in some way, its own appendage.

“How should I know?” Quill replied.

“I mean, it’s your kid,” Tanya shrugged.

“Tanya, it’s _Maru_ , this week. I don’t make these decisions! Learn to Google, and stop asking stupid questions.”

**

“So, the dad’s a robot, yeah?” Ram whispered to Charlie one day behind the practice fields. Quill had started back work recently, so there wasn’t really a good place to talk shit behind her back anymore. And talking shit _in front_ of her back was, as always, a very risky proposition.  27 phones had been destroyed in response to the question, “Any baby pictures?” alone.

“I don’t know who the father is,” Charlie replied, confused as to why he was meeting Ram here.

“But he’s gotta be, yeah?” Ram asked.

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Nah, but like, you know, you probably _know_ know. You know?”

Charlie looked at Ram like he was an alien. Which, to him, he was, to be fair.

Ram raised his eyebrows significantly a few times.

Charlie finally got it. He found himself disappointed. “Ram, I thought this would be easier for you to understand. I know I get it confused sometimes, but you’ve been exposed to sexual dimorphism in humans all your life. I am a male. Quill is not.”

“No, I know that,” Ram said dismissively. “Still, you know. You must know _things_.”

“Rhodia and Quill are two, whole different species. Rhodians are grown in test tubes. Official party line has it that Rhodian genitals haven’t touched each other in 5000 years.”

“Yeah, but you and Matteusz are always…and so if _you_ shagged the internet--“

“It would be like if I asked you how Dolly the sheep was cloned--”

“You shag sheep, too?” Ram asked, aghast.

Charlie pulled out his most princely tones. “Ram. Never ask me about mine or my people’s sexual reproductive practices again, or I shall be forced to perform the fgh-niarta.”

“The what now?”

“Exactly,” Charlie replied solemnly, walking off.

(Ram didn’t need to know that the fgh-niarta consisted of a very strongly worded letter).

**

Quilliam spent three weeks as a hedgehog, during which time Quill brought it to school every day.

“Do you think this is good sign?” Matteusz asked, nodding at the hedgehog on Quill’s desk, whose stomach Quill was tickling absentmindedly.

“I think she just likes hedgehogs,” Charlie said.

“Maybe it’s a sign that like, motherly instincts are kicking in, and she’s finally going to be taking good care of it,” April offered.

Tanya snorted loud enough for Quill to raise her head up and glare at her for making noise in class. Everyone knew that the best learning took place in absolute silence that did not interrupt Miss Quill, her coffee, or her hedgehog.

Tanya pretended to be silent and working on a problem for a while, before finally saying, “She’s taking excellent care of it.”

“She hasn’t even named it,” Ram argued.

“Right,” Tanya rolled her eyes. “Look at it like this. It doesn’t seem to require feeding or hygiene care. I reckon it needs a basic amount of protection, but it gets that just from sticking about. So what does it do? What is it constantly paying attention to?”

The group of them looked at Tanya, then shrugged.

“Shapes. Sounds. Colors. It mimics forms. Changes them. Every time she watches something around it, takes it somewhere. Every time the bell rings, and another twenty faces and forms and thousands of different sounds rush in. She’s being a fine mum,” Tanya finished with a shrug.

“Yeah, but do you think she realizes she’s doing that?” Charlie asked finally.

“Does it matter?” Tanya asked with a shrug, mostly because she didn’t feel like arguing with Charlie about it.

But Tanya did reckon Quill knew what she was doing. She generally did. And if Quill liked hedgehogs and managed to convince her weird mimic-baby to be a hedgehog, more power to her. Had it been her, Tanya would have gone with ferrets, but still, respect.

**

It was a bit of a shock when it took human form the first time.

“Hello, son,” it said, seated in a chair in the living room, voice booming.

Charlie nearly pissed himself. Matteusz punched the figure in the face. Quill pushed past the two of them in the hall, laughing.

The thing in the chair was comically paternalistic looking and dressed as though it was very serious about going fishing, complete with rod and very stupid hat. Its lips and beard twitched into a smile. “There’s other fish in the sea, son,” it said.

“What,” Charlie said. He had intended it to be a question. It didn’t even really sound like a word, honestly. It sounded like a sound he had forcibly expelled from the back of his throat. Like a wild, panicked, animal sound vaguely shaped like an interrogative.

“I’ve been watching fishing videos on YouTube. It’s relaxing to go to sleep too,” Quill shrugged.

Matteusz knelt down in front of Fishing Dad and said, “Do you think this is its way of telling us it wants a father figure?”

“No, I think it’s picking up on the twee heteronormative gender norms of this culture,” Quill replied.

“Would you like to son to learn to son to shave to remove your facial whiskers?” Fishing Dad asked Matteusz.

“Okay, I have no idea how it got that,” Quill frowned, gesturing. “I also have no idea what parental controls to fix to stop it.”

**

Several months later, Charlie walked downstairs to find two Matteuszs. Matteusz’s. Matteuzi.

Too many of his boyfriend.

“Erm,” Charlie said.

“Hello,” both Matteusz said simultaneously.

Charlie was still walking back and forth, eyeballing both Matteuszs, trying to spot a visual difference, when Quill came downstairs.

“Oh my god,” she said. “They’re multiplying.”

“No, I think it’s Blinky,” Charlie replied with a hand wave.

“Which one?” Quill asked.

“I don’t know,” Charlie admitted. “Maybe both. Matteusz, seriously, cut it out.”

“Have you asked them questions? Things only they would know?” Quill suggested.

“Of course I have,” Charlie said crossly. He wasn’t stupid.

Quill joyfully smacked him so hard in the back of the head that he saw stars. Charlie kept forgetting she could do that now. Quill absolutely _never_ forgot she could do that now, of course.

“Jak się masz?” Quill asked.

“Kurczak,” one Matteusz replied.

“Słońce,” added the other.

“Text messaging,” the first added.

“Denim,” the final agreed.

“Do you—do you speak Polish?” Charlie blinked.

“Can I carry on a basic level of conversation with someone who lives in my house in their native tongue? Why, yes. Yes, I can, Charles. Because I’m not a terrible person who lacks basic empathy,” Quill said, before vividly slandering Charlie’s dead mother in flawless Rhodian. (And some of those epithets, he did not point out, seemed to indicate a fluency that went far beyond the merely conversational. But then, talking shit was probably considered an important part of warfare.)

“Matteusz,” Charlie said, choosing to ignore Quill’s well-placed barbs, “Please stop this. Stop pretending to be Blinky. Or vice versa.”

“Jak się masz?” a Matteusz replied.

“Dobranoc,” the other said.

Quill returned to where Charlie was interrogating the Matteuszi, sipping coffee, then shaking her head exaggeratedly. “Can’t tell the difference. Wouldn’t even know if there weren’t two of them. You’ll just have to bring them both to school.”

“I’m not—“ Charlie began protesting. “We can’t bring them to school.”

“Shame; truancy’s definitely the sort of thing you get a detention for,” Quill smirked.

Charlie panicked. “Matteusz! Don’t do this. I know you think this is funny, but—“

“Oops, gonna be late,” Quill said with a deadly grin. “Well, I’ll see you lot at school. Or not. Your choice.”

Later, in detention, Matteusz (the real one) would maintain it was worth it just to see Charlie’s face.

Later still, in bed, before stripping Matteusz’s trousers off, Charlie would pause, and very sincerely, say, “It _is_ you isn’t it. Because that would be deeply unsettling, and I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself.”

“Dobranoc,” Matteusz replied with a smile. “Vests. Emoji.”

They didn’t have sex that night, even after Matteusz had reassured him he was just joking and lulled Charlie to sleep by telling him stories about his childhood. His very real childhood. That he had. Because he wasn’t a bunch of pixels.

**

One day, it disappeared.

Everyone found this greatly concerning. A search was begun, but since it could be anything, the search was proving impossible.

Ram was going around tapping suspicious looking decorations with a pencil to see if they vibrated in a funny way. Matteusz had noticed that it didn’t break or flinch when you punched it, but had also found that method prohibitively dangerous to test out.

Quill wasn’t concerned. “Everyone’s got to leave the nest eventually,” she offered with a shrug.

“It’s not exactly a normal Quill,” Charlie pointed out.

“Even less reason for me to care,” Quill replied.

This was, admittedly, a fair point. (Although Tanya thought it best not to mention that that she’d spotted Quill poking at a few things with a pencil herself).

“Do you reckon it’s alright?” April asked Tanya in a quiet moment.

“It probably found its calling as a novelty fart sound machine or something,” Tanya said, trying to reassure April.

But really, who knew about the lifecycle of a missingno? Certainly not Tanya. Maybe it’d lived fast, died hard, and burned its little pixel-heart out, like some kind of fruit fly.

She definitely was not reading Biology at uni.

**

It had been finding itself, actually. On an emotional journey. Making its way in the world.

Or rather, it had been pretending to be a potted plant while some random student’s family it had followed home had watched the entire series of _Friends_.

It showed back up at the front door of the flat looking like someone had smeared a picture of Joey from _Friends_ with a bunch of Vaseline.

“Who the hell are you?” Quill asked, because why the fuck did she _still_ have to answer the door. She wasn’t their slave, anymore, but they were, unfortunately, still teenaged boys.

“Mother,” it offered. “’Tis I.”

And it was, absolutely, not under any circumstances, going to say ‘the Frenchiest Fry.’ Because it’d moved past mere imitation. It was at synthesis and evolution. It was creating its own unique self from the impossible vastness of the whole of the universe. It was not a meme, but a real being.

“Tis I. The second Frenchiest Fry.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, that’s not even a good meme,” Quill said, shoving them back inside.

**

“Why does everyone have only one form?” It asked at the resulting impromptu child-rearing meeting that followed.

(Impromptu child-rearing meetings were a thing they had, and had been having for a while. “It takes a village,” April had offered to Quill during the first meeting. “Did I complain?” Quill had asked. “Yeah, you just told me not to drink your coffee or you’d rip my head off,” April replied. “See, I think we’re having a fundamental misunderstanding. Coffee and children aren’t the same thing, and if you think they are, I don’t want you around the coffeemaker or this alleged-child-village you’re creating.”)

“We just do,” Tanya replied. “Have one form.”

“That doesn’t seem very practical,” It mused.

“What’s your name?” April asked.

“Joey Tribbiani,” it offered.

“Your name can’t be Joey Tribbiani,” Ram said. “That’s the guy from _Friends_. Miss, can’t you just name him like a normal mum?”

“I didn’t die. I’m already way more invested in this than I ought be,” Quill protested, throwing her hands up in disgust.

“It is sentient, at least, we’ve found that out,” Tanya mused.

“Why is everyone having a different conversation?” Matteusz asked, looking bewildered.

Charlie shrugged, and began making coffee from the coffee stock that was _very specifically_ not Quill’s.

**

“Should I have only one form?” It said to Quill once everyone had left.

“If you want,” Quill said. They were watching YouTube videos together, as they tended. Someone on a BMX bike did something that assured the bicyclist would never have such a bonding moment with a child, what with the resultant testicular trauma. “But if you do want one form, please don’t make it embarrassing. Or human.”

It did something, changing its form to make it less Joey Tribbiani and more _Close Encounters_.  “What do you think?”

“I mean it’s alright,” Quill shrugged. “But it’s not even got quills.”

“Neither do you,” It pointed out.

“Yeah, but I would if I could, wouldn’t I?”

Its next form had quills. And also flames on the side of Its face, because that looked cool. And one of its legs was a toy dinosaur.

Growing pains.

**

“Where is It?” Ram asked, scratching at his cheek absentmindedly. For whatever reason, it seemed sort of humid in here today.

Matteusz didn’t want to say. Neither did Charlie.

Quill said it happily and watched him freak out. “You’re standing in It.”

And then Joey Tribbiani materialized out of thin air. “I’m being vapor!”

“He’s going through a phase,” Matteusz explained. “Strict corporeality is you know—“

“Passé,” Joey finished.

Ram marched out of the flat, scrubbing his face disconsolately.

**

“My father’s not the internet, right?” It asked. It was presently a potato. Just because.

Quill had the sudden urge to make chips from it. “Oh, for—look, don’t make me parent you by telling you who you can and cannot be friends with, but I am convinced at this point that all this is Ram Singh’s way of letting us all know he would use an Ethernet cable for sounding and is probably too stupid to be allowed to do anything other than kick things. Your father’s not the internet. Don’t be thick.”

It had perhaps taken that last bit of advice too literally, and was no thicker than a millimeter for the remainder of the week.

**

Quill could sense the trouble coming. A sense of dull inevitability with a little bit of ‘Very Special Episode of an 80s Sitcom’ feel thrown into the mix just for fun.

Quill was drinking heavily in preparation when It walked into the kitchen. It was looking at her with what she was fairly sure were its visual sensory organs for this week. Even Matteusz avoided It when it was like this, taking on one of its _significantly_ less humanoid forms. 

Quill didn’t mind so much. Everyone was entitled to have eyeballs shaped like pincers if they really wanted them. Life goals, really.

“Look,” Quill said finally, before she was too drunk to have a proper heart-to-heart. “Do you want me to teach you how to kill someone? Because, self-defense and warfare how-to are basically where my family bonding skills end at.”

That strategy had worked for the others, after all. Well, Ram had flinched badly when that one monster’s skull had been crushed, but he was a guy. He just wasn’t going to be as good as Tanya or April at murder—basic facts of life. Which, come to think of it, had she ever figured out the gender of that thing she’d given birth to?

Meh. Unimportant details.

It shook its head, then dismantled the component atoms of one of the kitchen chairs, letting off a tiny, contained atomic explosion, leaving behind nothing but the smell of ozone. “Nah, I think I got it.”

“Holy shit,” Quill said in awe. “What happens if you need the body?”

“Then I just make my hands go all Freddy Krueger from _Nightmare on Elm Street_ ,” It replied, demonstrating.

“Fair enough.” Quill said, impressed. It could definitely hold its own.

There was an awkward protracted silence before It said, “They don’t like me very much.”

Quill panicked. “You don’t want a hug, do you? Because, if you want a hug, we’re getting Matteusz.”

It took on a shape that was distinctly hostile to being hugged by a human, in response. “I don’t want a hug! I’m just explaining things. Like why I’m leaving again.”

“Oh,” Quill replied. “Are you going to try _Seinfeld_ this time?”

“No, I meant something more substantial.”

“ _Star Trek?_ With the extended universe? Movies? Games?”

“Everybody here’s so, stable, you know? They’re always just one thing,” It paused. “It’s kinda disgusting.”

Quill could understand that. Humans were pretty disgusting. “I’m not sure how you’d get off planet.”

“I’m not sure I want to, yet. I just don’t want to be all,” It shifted into some generic humanoid form to prove its point, “Beep, boop, my name is Cindy.”

Quill nodded, then looked awkward, cleared her throat. “You, er, you might have family here.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m talking to you,” It replied crossly. It had respect for Quill. Seeing her be so stupid was disappointing.

“Not me,” Quill huffed, equally as cross. “Someone else. Someone who can do that…you know.” Quill made a weird little ‘whoosh, pop’ noise with her mouth, which It assumed meant the whole, ‘forming and reforming your entire molecular being’ thing. (And, not for the first time, It found itself thinking that the real wonder in the universe came from however the fuck voice boxes worked.)

“There’s someone like me out there?” It asked wistfully.

“No,” Quill shook her head. “No, you’re pretty fucked up, and most of both your species are dead, but there might be someone who could tell you what the deal is with the whole _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ -thing.”

“Ah.”

“Or, that could be a complete lie. I don’t know. I kind of got distracted by a fight to the death afterwards. It was a pretty trying day that was also like a year and yet only like half an hour. My best advice to you in life is if a woman ever tells you she can fix all your problems but you’ll have to meet your goddess first, just run, really quickly, and in her opposite direction.”

It was learning way more about itself than it wanted to. It had liked it better when it thought its father was a robot. Now it seemed certain that It had been the issuance from its mother’s weird sex cult, and that was just too much. Taking the mystery out of it all was really fucking Its shit up. “Alright,” It said, just to stop her from talking.

“Just, go find UNIT if you like. Say you’re part Lor. Law. Lawl. Lorl,” Quill frowned. “I should’ve asked him how to spell it. Didn’t think it was going to come up again, at the time.”

“How do I find UNIT?”

“Wandering around London saying, ‘I’m an alien, and I hate the Doctor,’ works pretty well,” Quill offered with a shrug. “I used to have this woman’s mobile number, but she got tired of the 3AM ‘DTF?’ texts.”

“I should probably be off, then,” It said at last. It did not want to admit it, but It sort of wanted a hug.

Probably sensing that, Quill offered it the only socially acceptable form of physical intimacy any Quill knew, and punched It in the face.

It was touched. Unhurt, but still. Very touched.

Everything was going to be alright.

Probably.

Maybe.

Well, not really, but as much as things ever were in the universe.

 

 

 

 


End file.
